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Over the past ten years, sociologists have broadened their view of what counts as an appropriate measure of mental health. This reflects a growing recognition that individuals express emotional upset in various ways. For example, some individuals are more likely to become depressed in response to stress while others are more likely to drink heavily. Contemporary studies often include measures of "internalizing" (i.e., more feeling-based measures) and "externalizing" (i.e., more behavioral measures) styles of psychopathology, especially when studying group differences in mental health. Alcohol abuse is the classic measure of externalized distress in sociological research. In this paper, we present a theoretical argument and supporting empirical evidence to argue that violent behavior should be included as a measure of externalized distress in response to stress. Our study suggests that violent behavior is a more likely response to stress among individuals with particular coping and appraisal tendencies. Specifically, violent behavior may be a more likely response to stress among individuals who tend to appraise situations as threatening while also repressing any emotional response to stress. We contend that, since some groups may be more likely than others to respond to stress with violence, it is particularly important to include measures of violent behavior when studying group difference in distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although several theoretical and methodological approaches have been developed for assessing the meaning of roles and role-related stressors, individuals' own understandings of the meaning of their role identities have been ignored in stress research. In this paper, I first examine the ways in which meaning has been conceptualized and assessed. I then explore the meanings individuals themselves attach to role identities and their implications for mental health. Qualitative analyses of in-depth follow-up interviews with 40 people who had participated in a community panel study of mental health reveal considerable variation in the meanings they attach to spouse, parent, and worker identities. I also find that the meanings people assign to role identities are based on their perceptions of the benefits and costs of role involvement. Moreover, while most meanings are shared by men and women, there are gender differences in some meanings which reflect gender differences in the perceived benefits and costs of role involvement. Finally, quantitative analyses show that some meanings of role identities are associated with symptoms and are involved in gender differences in distress. These and other illustrative findings suggest that stress researchers would find it useful to incorporate the meanings individuals themselves attach to their role identities and devote greater attention to men's and women's perceptions of both the positive and negative aspects of their role involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stress process paradigm is one of the most widely held perspectives in the sociology of mental health. While this model has been applied to a large number of research problems, relatively little work has examined whether the paradigm can assist in understanding the link between socially induced stressors and their consequences for the mental health of immigrants. In this paper, we employ a stress process formulation to examine the interplay among stressors, psychological and social resources, and psychological distress among a large sample of Korean immigrants living in Toronto, Canada. Data from a longitudinal study of over 600 respondents indicate that the stress process paradigm provides a useful perspective for understanding how chronic stressors associated with the immigration experience manifest themselves in psychological distress. Our results suggest that social and psychological resources have important deterrent effects on the experience of stressors and their subsequent distressful consequences. Ethnic social support and mastery are especially important factors in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, a body of research has developed which purports to show that the well-established relationship between race and psychological distress is duc entirely to social class. In our paper we demonstrate that this view is incorrect: Most prior research has assumed that the effects of race and social class are additive; our analysis shows that they are actually interactive. The form of interaction is such that thc true effect of race is suppressed and tire true effect of social class is magnified in a model that fails to take the interaction into consideration. An analysis of eight different epidemiologic surveys documents this result and shows that race differences in psychological distress are particularly pronounced among people with low incomes. On the basis of this result we call for renewed interest in the effect of race on mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]